Introduction
Introducción Article Abstracts:
-by Sonia Nieto
Puerto Rican communities have been a reality in many northeastern urban centers
for over a century. Schools and classrooms have felt their presence through
the Puerto Rican children attending school. The education of Puerto Ricans
in U.S. schools has been documented for about seventy years, but in spite
of numerous commissions, research reports, and other studies, this history
is largely unknown to teachers and the general public. In addition to the
research literature, a growing number of fictional accounts in English are
providing another fertile avenue for understanding the challenges that Puerto
Ricans have faced, and continue to face, in U.S. schools. In this article,
Sonia Nieto combines the research on Puerto Rican students in U.S. schools
with the power of the growing body of fiction written by Puerto Ricans. In
this weaving of "fact" with "fiction," Nieto hopes to provide a more
comprehensive and more human portrait of Puerto Rican students. Based on
her reading of the literature in both educational research and fiction, Nieto
suggests four interrelated and contrasting themes that have emerged from
the long history of stories told about Puerto Ricans in U.S. schools:
colonialism/resistance, cultural deficit/cultural acceptance,
assimilation/identity, and marginalization/ belonging. Nieto's analysis of
these four themes then leads her to a discussion of the issue of care as
the missing ingredient in the education of Puerto Ricans in the United
States.
-by Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas
In this article, Ana Ramos-Zayas argues that schooling cannot be divorced
from the political and socioeconomic forces governing neighborhood development.
She focuses on the role of grassroots activists with a nationalist agenda
(i.e., in favor of independence for Puerto Rico) in community-based educational
projects in Chicago, particularly the Pedro Albizu Campos High School (PACHS),
a compelling example of the potential of an educational project based on
a nationalist ideology. For Puerto Ricans, the question of the political
status of the Island--future U.S. state, commonwealth, or independent nation--has
been debated for the past one hundred years. For the students and teachers
of PACHS, independence, and an education based on the principles of Puerto
Rican self-determination, is the only option. Ramos-Zayas argues that an
oppositional education based on such a political ideology is a powerful,
yet largely untapped, resource for creating successful ethnoracial youth
and popular education programs. She contends that, in a community considered
among the poorest of the poor, where Puerto Rican youth continue to drop
out of high school, join gangs, and experience the most inhuman consequences
of poverty, such a successful social initiative must be considered carefully.
She points out the irony that this nationalist ideology--which encourages
critical appraisal of U.S. policies toward Puerto Rico and of the ideology
of the American Dream--actually encourages high school students to pursue
mainstream mobility routes, such as abandoning gangs, finishing high school,
and enrolling in college. The powerful, positive presence nationalist activism
among Chicago Puerto Ricans is undeniable, as is the sense of hope and
possibility that students and barrio residents experience at Pedro Albizu
Campos High School and other community development projects in Chicago.
-by Sandra Del Valle
In this article, Sandra Del Valle examines the struggle for bilingual education
as a fight for civil rights in which lawyers and litigation have played a
large role. By specifically looking at the role of Puerto Ricans in New York
City in these struggles, she examines the fatal gap between two visions of
bilingual education--the vision of the grassroots Puerto Rican community
that saw bilingual education as educational enrichment, and the remedial
model that was ultimately adopted and advanced by lawyers and other professionals
in the courts. As Del Valle argues, national policymakers, federal courts,
and advocacy organizations have raised the nation's consciousness on issues
affecting language-minority students; however, these forces have also contributed
to the compromised nature of bilingual education, making it especially vulnerable
to attack. Therefore, the role between these entities--that is, education
advocates, policymakers, and the courts-- must be constructed differently
and take its cues from students, parents, and local grassroots
organizations.
-by Catherine E. Walsh
In this article, Catherine Walsh presents and analyzes the colonial
"push-and-pull" of education in a White-run, northeastern school system where
Puerto Rican students are the numerical majority. Using school department
data, court reports, interviews, and field notes collected over the last
five years, Walsh provides a case study of the condition and experience of
Puerto Rican students in these schools, making central the present-day
manifestations of colonialism in the workings of schools and highlighting
the opposition that emerges in response. This opposition includes
racially/ethnically positioned tensions that shape administrative policy-
and decisionmaking. Walsh suggests that students, parents, and others working
for the improvement of conditions for Puerto Ricans must come to better
understand the push-and-pull of colonial relations in the schools, make
connections between the need and strategies for educational change and for
change in other social institutional contexts, and establish alliances across
groups, contexts, and other boundaries.
Antonia Pantoja is an important activist and educator in the Puerto Rican
community, both on the Island and in the United States. Pantoja was interviewed
for the Harvard Educational Review by Wilhelmina Perry, an African
American educator who has known Pantoja for the last twenty years as a colleague,
friend, and coworker. This interview is part of a dialogue around the significant
issues of Pantoja's life that reflect her life's work resisting the colonization
of the Puerto Rican community. Through Pantoja's memories we are provided
with the early and personal experiences that shaped her political and social
commitments in her struggle against injustice. Pantoja's contribution to
this Symposium brings in a unique voice of a Puerto Rican woman committed
to her people.
by Peter McLaren.
Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997. 304 pp. $21.95 (paper).
Today, we are surrounded and invaded by talk of "multiculturalism," which has been objectified and made into a commodity that can be bought and packaged into practically anything from curricula to crayons to toys. Hearing and reading about the topic has become almost overwhelming.
Against this background, Peter McLaren's latest book, Revolutionary Multiculturalism, presents a perspective different from the "feel-good-about-myself" drive towards multiculturalism, pluralism, and diversity we usually encounter. McLaren explores and unearths the multifaceted dimensions of oppression, addressing it in terms of ethnicity, race, class, gender, and sexual preference, teasing out the interconnections among them and integrating the critiques of these different facets of oppression, adopting what he calls a "commitment to others and otherness" (p. 13).
In Revolutionary Multiculturalism, a book permeated by the language and perspective of critical pedagogy, we are presented with a move beyond the "language of critique and domination" (p. 18) of radical educational theory. McLaren offers us a vision of "hope in an era of cynical reason" (p. 7) and invites us to engage in a construction of public spheres of hope and struggle, beyond the comfort of our everyday lives. He urges us to search for the "common ground of struggle rather than a common culture"(p. 12). For example, he questions those who, from a radical pedagogy perspective, have simply critiqued schools as agencies of domination but have rarely asked themselves, or tried to figure out, what schools should be like or what they might become. What McLaren presents us with is a politics of radical hope and a praxis of transformation, where educators can and must become agents of social change and where schools could be the places in which "the socially constructed and often contradictory experiences and needs of students might be made problematic so as to provide the basis for exploring the interface between their own lives and the constraints and possibilities within the wider social order" (p. 34).
A recurrent and important theme throughout McLaren's book is the criticism and questioning of the global economic restructuring and capitalist order in which we live, and in which, according to McLaren, ethics have become obsolete.
Also dominant in his book is the critique of Whiteness and White hegemony and supremacy:
Rather than stressing the importance of diversity and inclusion, as do most multiculturalists, I think that significantly more emphasis should be placed on the social and political construction of white supremacy and the dispensation of white hegemony. The reality-distortion field known as "whiteness" needs to be identified as a cultural disposition and ideology linked to specific political, social, and historical arrangements. (p. 8)
McLaren suggests that the "inclusion" of minority populations and "diversification" of social spheres will mean little without the destabilization of this White hegemony and supremacy.
McLaren's revolutionary perspective towards multiculturalism critiques neoliberal democracy's attempts towards "diversity and pluralism." He suggests that a democracy that has "cease[d] to be[come] restless" is a democracy that has become the "politics of white supremacist patriarchal capitalism" (p. 47). Moving away from mere diversity and pluralism, McLaren offers us the vision of a critical and revolutionary multiculturalism.
Three of the chapters in Revolutionary Multiculturalism were coauthored with McLaren's colleagues Henry A. Giroux, Zeus Leonardo, and Kris Gutierrez. Also included is McLaren's interview by Gert Biesta and Siebren Miedema.
The common theme that runs throughout the book can be characterized as an exploration of the ways in which power could be mobilized for human liberation and the development of a postcolonial pedagogy of anti-colonialism, anti-racism, anti-imperialism, and anti-homophobia. But despite this common theme, McLaren's book reads like a collection of essays. Each chapter remains disconnected from the rest, with only this common theme linking them.
Revolutionary Multiculturalism reflects a great sensitivity and a critical consciousness about various and diverse issues. It is written in clear, accessible language. As Peter McLaren states, he continuously asks himself, "How has the culture of imperialism been written on me, in me, through me?" (p. 96). Thus, I was quite perplexed and even bothered by McLaren's loose use of the term "American." Most often, it was obvious from the context that he meant "of U.S. origin." Although he is critical of such terms as "Third World," being careful to make explicit his position and reasoning behind such the term, he does not take the same care when using the term "American." American means much more than "of U.S. origin"; it refers to a whole continent. Thus, excluding other people from being American and reserving the term for those of U.S. origin reminds us that the imperialist hold is strong and alive, and that it permeates our language. I agree with McLaren that multiculturalism, diversity, and pluralism are nothing if we do not look inside ourselves and analyze and critique the many overt and covert ways in which we help to perpetuate oppression.
B.M.B.
Anything but Mexican: Chicanos in Contemporary Los Angeles
by Rodolfo F. Acuña.
New York: Verso, 1996. 328 pp. $29.95 (paper).
Anything but Mexican is an incisive, meticulously researched, and timely book that documents the irreversible demographic shift taking place in California, particularly in Los Angeles, which has the second-largest population of Mexicans after Mexico City. This is the first book that analyses the historical significance of this fact in cultural, political, economic, and educational terms. It should be read by educators and policymakers for an up-to-date understanding of the contemporary Chicano community of Los Angeles.
Author Rodolfo F. Acuña is the foremost historian on Chicanos today. He wrote the seminal book, Occupied America: A History of Chicanos, as well as The Sonoran Strongman and Community Under Siege. He is professor and founder of Chicano Studies at California State University, Northridge, which has become the largest Chicano Studies department in the United States.
As Acuña explains, the plight of Mexicans/Chicanos in contemporary Los Angeles is partly explained by the pervasive historical amnesia of Euroamerica. He states:
It has long been an insult to be considered Mexican in this city. Until recently, for example, Mexican food was considered "Spanish," although it is one of the few things Mexican almost universally accepted by Euroamericans. . . . This preference for the European appears in L.A.'s public relations that promote a mythical Los Angeles in which cultural borrowing and harmony are the rule. That myth included the fantasy of a romantic "Hispanic"--read, European --past of dons and ranchos. That tradition is acceptable to Euroangelenos; the Mexican reality is not. (p. 1)
The fact is, there were never more than 100,000 Spaniards in Mexico or the Southwest at any one time. Mexicans are overwhelmingly Native American or mestizo, and, along with other Hispanics, they continue to have a strong presence in Los Angeles today. According to the U.S. Census, a little over 2.5 million people of Mexican extraction were living in Los Angeles in 1990, or 28.5 percent of the city's population; other "Hispanics" numbered 738,113, or 8 percent, making the total Hispanic population nearly one-third of the population of Los Angeles. Taking into consideration the usual undercount of Hispanics (i.e., undocumented, etc.), the figure could well be much larger.
Since the end of the Mexican-American War in 1848, Mexicans have been a conquered people in California, disempowered politically and economically. The restructuring of the city's economy in the 1970s, particularly the decline of heavy industry and the disappearance of manual labor jobs, combined with the city's economic decline in the 1980s, has had a devastating impact on the Chicano population. As Acuña notes, "Restructuring had severe human consequences in Los Angeles. . . . In Los Angeles County, Euroamericans made up 17 percent of those living in poverty; Latinos, 56.8 percent; Blacks, 15.5 percent; and Asians, 9.5 percent. U.S.-born Latinos earned 78 cents of every white male's dollar; U.S.-born Latinas earned 47 cents; and immigrant Latinas, 30 cents" (p. 177).
For Mexicans in Los Angeles, who have historically been marginalized economically and politically, education was always the key to the doorway of hope. But Chicanos and Latinos have faced serious obstacles in their quest for quality education: most recently, funding cutbacks in education (in 1978, Proposition 13 reduced substantially the local tax base for education) and a backlash of bigotry, as exemplified by Proposition 187 (denying education to undocumented students), Proposition 209 (the state's coup de grace of affirmative action), and the recent Unz Initiative, which calls for the dismantling of bilingual education. Within the context of this scenario, the dire state of Mexicans/Chicanos/Latinos in education can be better understood. Acuña documents the numbers:
In 1992 Latinos accounted for over 63 percent of the pupils in the Los Angeles Unified School district and close to 70 percent of those in elementary schools. . . . Latino high school seniors performed at the ninth-grade level in reading. Statewide, their high school dropout rate was double that of white students; 54 percent of the 19,381 high school students dropping out of the LAUSD (Los Angeles Unified School District) in 1987-1988 were Latinos. Overall, Latinos in the late 1980s had a 40 percent high school dropout rate. (p. 290)
Despite the history of adversity in Los Angeles, Mexicans have endured, learned, and redoubled their struggle for a better life. Acuña too is hopeful for a better future:
We can only hope that fewer of our people will hacerce pendejos [willingly remain ignorant] in the next, crucial, period of time, as Chicanos and Latinos build their political base in Los Angeles and elsewhere in the United States. . . . Neither riots, fires, earthquakes, police harassment or Proposition 187 can drive Mexicanos and other Latinos out of Los Angeles. That is because they have no other place to go--this is and has been their home, and they will not be driven away. So perhaps, if people remember that, the days of "anything but Mexican" are numbered. (p. 320)
F.G.B.
Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875-1928
by David Wallace Adams.
Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995. 396 pp. $29.95 (paper).
Education for Extinction is a poignant and heartbreaking book that chronicles the infamous history of the U.S. government's efforts to indoctrinate, deculturalize, and "Americanize" Native peoples through the use of boarding schools. Under the guise of "progress" and "civilization," thousands of native children were forcefully removed from their families and cultures, and deprived of their peoples' history. This book testifies to both the cruelties perpetrated against the hearts and minds of children and to the many acts of courage and resistance performed by these children.
The genesis of U.S. government policy towards Native people began in the 1780s. The prevailing Lockean mentality held that only a society established on a consensus of private property could promote social stability, political independence, and public morality. As Adams notes:
Whether discussing the Indians' worship of pagan gods, their simple organizations, or their dependency on wild game for subsistence, white observers found Indian society wanting. Indian life, it was argued, constituted a lower order of human society. In a word, Indians were savages because they lacked the very thing whites possessed--civilization. And since, by the law of historical progress and the doctrine of social evolution, civilized ways were destined to triumph over savagism, Indians would ultimately confront a fateful choice: civilization or extinction. (pp. 5-6)
After almost a century of checkered policies (Indian removal, broken treaties, and bloody warfare), in 1871, Congress deemed Native peoples to be wards of the government, a de facto colonized people. The concept of Indian education was proposed by reformers in the 1870s and soon gained support among government officials and the public. The aims of Indian education were several: one, to provide Indian children with the rudiments of an academic education, including reading, writing, and speaking English; two, Indians needed to be individualized, as reformers felt that tribal life placed more importance on the tribal community than on the individual; and third, Indian education was Americanization. It was within this context that, in 1877, Congress began to appropriate funds expressly for Indian education.
The boarding schools were primarily of two types: reservation schools and off-reservation schools. The typical teacher in the Indian schools was a single White woman in her late twenties, partly because teaching had been defined as "women's work," and partly because women were less expensive to employ than men. In the schools, the assault on the cultural identity of Indian children began with a haircut (to look more like White children), a change of the students' dress (usually a uniform), and the assignation of European names. So as not to contaminate the process of Americanization, Indian languages, customs, and religions were prohibited, and parental visits were discouraged.
Both boys and girls were subjected to daily marching drills, presumably to exterminate their innate "wildness." They were also subjected to corporal punishment. Students who resisted or refused to conform to the school rules were remanded to the school "jail" or "guardhouse." Students suffered from either malnourishment, which arose from extreme dietary changes, or undernourishment, due to limited supplies of food. Diseases were rampant, because of dietary problems and because of the shoddy construction and dilapidated conditions of the school buildings, largely a result of corrupt Bureau of Indian Affairs bureaucrats who embezzled or misappropriated government school funds.
Indian children and their home communities resisted their attempts at deculturalization. As Adams explains, "a major motivation for resistance, [was] namely, that a significant body of tribal opinion saw white education for what it was: an invitation to cultural suicide" (p. 212). He continues:
Students resisted for several reasons. First, there was the deep resentment occasioned by the institution itself. . . . Second, resistance was in part political. For older students especially, it took little imagination to discern that the entire school program constituted an uncompromising hegemonic assault on their cultural identity. . . . Finally, resistance can be explained in psychological terms. In the context of severe cultural conflict, students were experiencing education in terms of what anthropologists have come to call "acculturation stress," "cultural discontinuity" and "cognitive dissonance." (p. 223)
Despite daily humiliation, many children's spirits remained unbroken; they remained "patriots" to their own people. They resisted attempts to "Americanization" by running away, committing arson, and, most pervasively, through acts of passive resistance (i.e., acts of defiance, class disruptions, "work slow downs," unresponsiveness). Still others clandestinely kept alive and taught others their languages, customs, rituals, and history.
This is a must-read book for all educators, especially for those who wish to work with students of color. As this book powerfully reminds us, education is an encounter, not a discovery.
F.G.B.
The Other Struggle for Equal Schools: Mexican Americans during the Civil Rights Era
by Rubén Donato.
Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997. 152 pp. $19.95.
Over the past few years, communities in the Southwest have been besieged by various statewide referendums, court decisions, and school practices that have rolled back the gains achieved by civil rights movements. When one looks to the literature on educational history or the civil rights movements, one is hard pressed to find a substantive amount of writings on Mexican American/Chicano communities. As I read through this literature, I am often left with several questions unanswered: How did public education and civil rights movements develop in the Southwest? What were Chicano communities doing during this period? What role did these communities play in the expansion of public education and educational reform? How did Chicanos initiate or respond to what was going on around them?
In The Other Struggle for Equal Schools: Mexican Americans during the Civil Rights Era, Rubén Donato provides a fascinating, insightful, and informative look at how Chicano communities in general, and one Chicano community in particular, asserted their individual and collective rights in their goals for a just and equitable education for their children during the civil rights era of the 1960s and 1970s. Using primary sources including interviews, school board minutes, state and local reports, community organization files, and newspapers, Donato critically examines how a Chicano/ Mexicano community in Brownsfield, California (Brownsfield is a pseudonym), organized in its struggle for an equitable educational system. In telling the story of the Brownsfield community, Donato is careful to inform the reader of what was going on during the same period at the national level in terms of education and civil rights movements. By doing so, Donato provides readers at all levels of knowledge of U.S. educational history a firm understanding of the period, as well as an understanding of where Mexican American communities were in relation to that history, both in regards to education and civil rights movements.
The book comprises seven chapters, each of which outlines local developments within broader regional and national contexts. The first three chapters serve to locate Brownsfield within broader societal issues of public schooling, community development, and civil rights. In chapter one, "Schooling in the Pre-Brown Era," Donato briefly reviews issues of segregation, Americanization, vocational education, and psychometrics in relation to Chicano education. Chapter two, "Evolution of a Community and the Making of a School District," provides a concise historical overview of California and the Brownsfield community after the military conquest of northern Mexico in 1848. Donato specifically focuses on the educational history of the Brownsfield Unified School District and the politics of district consolidation. In chapter three, "Emergence of Grassroots Activism," Donato outlines the development of Chicano civil rights movements within the context of the broader civil rights movements of the 1960s. Donato also describes how the Mexican American people in Brownsfield began to organize as a community in their quest for educational equity for their children.
Chapters four through six outline how the Mexican American and Anglo communities of Brownsfield responded to year-round schooling, bilingual education, and the legal dismantling of school segregation. In chapter four, "The Irony of Year-Round Education," Donato describes how Mexican migrant parents were excluded from the decisionmaking processes of year-round education, and how they mobilized as a community in response to this exclusion. Chapter five, "Mandated Bilingual Education Comes to Town," is a detailed account of how both the school system and communities of Brownsfield responded to mandated bilingual education. In particular, Donato describes the school district's aggressive implementation of bilingual education and the resistance the district encountered from parts of the White community, which led to strategic political mobilization by the Mexican American community. In chapter six, "Self-Interest and Compliance in the Desegregation Process," Donato looks at desegregation in the Mexican American context of the Southwest in the 1960s and 1970s, and the experience of the Brownsfield school system and community in the politics of desegregation. Chapter seven, "Summary and Conclusions," provides a succinct review of the book's chapters.
Overall, Donato has done a skillful job of describing and analyzing how local communities responded to larger national movements, as well as to regional and localized issues of equal and just schooling for all children. The Other Struggle for Equal Schools makes a significant contribution to our collective understanding of both the educational history and civil rights struggles of a people long ignored in mainstream educational history, and should be included within any course or curriculum related to education, history, and/or civil rights.
J.F.M.
The Changing Curriculum: Studies in Social Construction
by Ivor F. Goodson.
New York: Peter Lang, 1997. 210 pp. $29.95 (paper).
The Changing Curriculum: Studies in Social Construction, Ivor Goodman's collection of ten essays that look at the processes that shape curriculum, is of interest to teachers, students, and researchers who want to understand the social construction process. It is of special value for those who care about the how and why of curriculum.
Too often, educators and administrators think of curriculum as an engineering design that simply tells teachers what to do and when, a perspective that could gain ground in a standards-driven view of education. Goodson's interpretation of curriculum construction defies simplistic definition and resists reduction of curriculum to a magic recipe. The Changing Curriculum examines the intersections of social class, history, politics, and curriculum. It is at once political theory, curriculum history, curriculum theory, and sociology. In short, Goodson gives us curriculum as it is--a remarkably complex construction rooted in the past, active in the present, and often creative of the future. Most importantly, he never allows us to forget that curriculum is a social construction made in a variety of arenas and at a variety of levels. He argues that, if we are to understand schooling, we must recognize that curriculum often sets the parameters of practice and of possibility, and therefore deserves our attention.
In a sense, The Changing Curriculum is a reminder that we have much to learn about the political and social processes involved in curriculum construction. At the end of each chapter, Goodson suggests areas and issues for further consideration. Chapter four, for example, moves from the "personal to the programmatic" as the author reveals how he developed an interest in the concept of school subjects first through his own life, and later through reading Basil Bernstein's work in what Goodson labels the "social constructionist study of the curriculum" (p. 55). He challenges readers to expand these ideas by creating curriculum histories "that seek to elucidate and analyze" the ongoing processes of social construction "to provide a new terrain of study where the school subject might be employed as an entry point for social analysis" (p. 56). If we are to "understand fully the process that is schooling," we must "look inside the curriculum" (p. 196). The Changing Curriculum is an invitation and an enticement to do so.
J.P.S.
Personas Mexicanas: Chicano High Schoolers in a Changing Los Angeles
by James Diego Vigil.
Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace College, 1997. 160 pp. $18.50 (paper).
Personas Mexicanas: Chicano High Schoolers in a Changing Los Angeles is one of a series of case studies in cultural anthropology edited by George and Louise Spindler. The editors state:
These case studies in cultural anthropology are designed for students in beginning and intermediate courses in the social sciences, to bring them insights into the richness and complexity of human life as it is lived in different ways, in different places. The authors are men and women who have lived in the societies they write about and who are professionally trained as observers and interpreters of human behavior. (Foreword, p. v)
Author James Diego Vigil is a native of Los Angeles and a former public school teacher. He has taught at the elementary, junior, and senior high levels. He is presently a professor of anthropology and Chicano studies at UCLA, as well as the director of the university's Center for the Study of Urban Poverty. He has authored several books, including his ground-breaking 1989 book on Chicano gangs, Barrio Gangs.
Personas Mexicanas is the first book to focus entirely on the experience and plight of Chicano high school students, whose history has been marked by exclusion, marginalization, and miseducation. Vigil notes, "The policies of Americanization and segregation combined to ensure problems in school for Mexican-American students -- damned completely by segregation and daunted by a learning problem based on a premise of `cultural deficiency'" (p. 4). Another problem that compromised Chicano students' learning was the pervasive use of pseudo-IQ tests, which provided a veneer of respectability for racism.
Vigil focuses on two studies that he conducted in 1974 and 1988, a qualitative and a quantitative comparison of acculturation and school success among Chicano students at two Los Angeles high schools, one urban and the other suburban. Vigil concludes:
What began as nativist acculturation--for example, learning the English language while retaining the Spanish one--has evolved into a trend of Mexicanization. This broader and deeper process has affected Mexican people of all generations even if the signs for some are symbolic. A sound, solid ethnic (and personal) identity in this context enables the students to feel good about themselves, as they strive to achieve. (p. 122)
Vigil highlights a second important factor for those Chicano students who strive to achieve:
Of the many factors that shape a successful school record for students, it is clear that family support stands over the others. . . . A stable ethnic identity results from a well-developed acculturation strategy, but the family and family members must play a role here, too. Where family support is absent, the student usually shows a lackluster effort to excel academically. (p. 122)
I strongly recommend this perceptive and illuminating book to all educators and policymakers who would like to become better informed about Chicano school failure and success.
F.G.B.
Many Families, Many Literacies: An International Declaration of Principles
edited by Denny Taylor.
Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1997. 244 pp. $25.95 (paper).
Many Families, Many Literacies: An International Declaration of Principles supports families, recognizes diverse communities, and promotes equality and social justice. The development of an International Declaration of Principles began in 1994 when international scholars gathered at the International Forum on Family Literacy in Tucson, Arizona, to address the development of family literacy programs and the national standards to assess these programs. Subsequent meetings included other literacy scholars and practitioners who met at the Whole Language Umbrella Conference in 1995 and at the Family Literacy Seminar for teachers at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education in 1996. This collaborative process resulted in a comprehensive and useful volume that may be viewed as a handbook that literacy experts, policymakers, and practitioners will find thought provoking and useful.
This book includes the history of the declaration, a preamble, the seven sets of literacy principles, and a section entitled, "I want to ask a question: Family members speak out," which addresses literacy programs. Editor Denny Taylor challenges the present deficit-driven family model embedded in literacy programs by redefining "the relationship of literacy to poverty, the notion of socioeconomic status, and the concept of 'disadvantaged'" families (p. 3) while being more inclusive of diverse families and acknowledging their funds of knowledge -- their language, their multiple approaches to literacies, and their ability to solve the daily events of life (p. xx). The rest of the volume is divided into the seven sets of literacy principles about families, language and literacy, ethical research issues, pedagogy and family literacy programs, assessment of family literacy programs, and policymakers' and educators' roles. Each section includes the definition of a literacy principle, as well as short essays and vignettes by literacy experts, practitioners, and family literacy program participants, who share their approaches to literacy practices at home and in the community. Some of the contributing authors are Marilyn Antonucci, Elsa Auerbach, Michele Foster, Ken and Yetta Goodman, and Elvira Souza Lima.
Taylor and the other contributors challenge the assumption that poor families are empty vessels. Taylor welcomes conversations with others to begin the process of redefining family literacy program policies away from a deficit-driven model to one that acknowledges the complexities within families and among families, and that builds on families' funds of knowledge while honoring and respecting them.
C.A.